Another Harvest of Shame
Nobody I voted for had anything to do with this. Yet I feel shamed just by the fact that these people are running the government of my country. Each day renews the reasons for that feeling, but some days it just goes to another level. Like Wednesday, when the Republican majority of the U.S. Senate prevented a bill from coming to the floor that proposed raising the minimum wage.
The minimum wage in the U.S. has been $5.15 an hour for almost ten years. If the minimum wage of 1968 were simply adjusted for inflation, it would be over $9 an hour now. The proposal was to raise it to seven bucks and change.
Recent studies show that right now a full time job at minimum wage will not pay the rent on a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the country.So you can work a forty hour week and be homeless. What's that about? You tell me what that wage is the minimum of. It's clearly not a minimum living wage.
The Republicans didn't want this bill to even be debated, because they would have to say why they opposed it. Doubtless they would have trotted out the argument they've used every time since at least 1961, when they said it to oppose President Kennedy raising the wage to $1.25 an hour: it will drive businesses out of business, and ruin the economy. It passed in 1961, and America had one of its most prosperous decades. It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now.
Instead, on this day, the House of Representative's leadership--Republican leadership--met to make sure they gave urgent priority to further tax cuts for the super-wealthy, in the form of estate tax cuts. Democrats back a bill to lessen such taxes on amounts of $7 million, but that's not enough for the Republicans. They want to cut the taxes of multimillionaires and billionaires, costing the U.S. Treasury billions. Though they claim this is all about helping small businesses and farmers, it's lies and (to employ a farmyard expression again) bullshit.
Who will benefit from this bit of legislation? According to Rep. Louise Slaughter, Bush, Cheney and his cabinet will personally benefit to the tune of between $91 million and $344 million if the estate tax is permanently repealed.
Yes, there is a class war in this country, and it's been openly waged for these ten years. It is the Republican sponsored war of the wealthy against everybody else. It's disgusting, it's demeaning, it's immoral, and it's yet another harvest of shame for this country.
1 week ago
4 comments:
Look, slavery has long been the labor system of ultimate choice as it best meets biologic needs.
Other labor organizations arise only temporarily, as compromises of convenience or during times of great common peril. History is simply a recounting of slave rebellions and slave supression.
Some of today's slaves or their progeny will become tomorrow's slaveowners. And some slaveowners or their progeny will become slaves.
Until someone figures out how to dissociate survival from competition, humans and every other life form on this planet will continue to act in their individual interests as they perceive them and as instinct compels.
I'm not sophisticated enough to discern whether Mr. anonymous is a provocative jokester or not, with his perverse Darwinian sociology. It sure does sound masculine and toughminded. Showing where the real brutality exists in our civilization, in the comfort earned by enslaving others and sending them to die so that the few can accumulate more wealth than they can possibly use.
Do I really need to make the case against slavery on grounds of economic efficiency? Actual slavery has never worked for long economically. Cooperation in all realms of biology has been at least as important as competition, though its in the interests of the oppressing powerful to suppress that information. As any real reading of biology, history and oneself will attest, our instincts are not all selfish and brutal.
And this is written in defense of the Republicans denying a rise in the minimum wage? On the basis that slavery is natural? Interesting.
Even above the minimum wage, it should be pointed out that the American worker has received a real dollar wage increase in only two years since 1971 - those years being 1997 and 1998.
And while I agree with most of what you say, I disagree re slavery. It actually supported the economies of every great civilization until the 18th century, and arguably well into the 19th century indirectly.
Don't need too much sophistication to understand me. That you label slavery as brutality doesn't make it less economic. Do you think that your sensitivities shouldn't be disturbed by the physical world? Personally, I'm offended I've got to eat, breathe and pee so much, but there it is.
Cookoo chicks rolling native eggs out of the nest, hatchling spiders consuming their mother, may be seen as brutal but are ingenious means for survival. Unless you claim some religious authority about humans, last time I checked we are animals much like the others. But our personal survival is even more dependent on our individual abilities to coerce our own kind. If I get you to slave for me at less "fitness" cost than what you produce, it works! And it usually does. Why is it that what is so often observed in the natural world suddenly becomes irrelevent when applied to present company? Thats actually a recent artifice. Eric v. kirk points out some good historical examples. Slavery today is just as real as it has ever been, but has the face of modernity, the present best method of slave passification. BTW the contemporary terms wageslave and netslave aren't just figures of speech IMHO.
Thanks for the toughminded masculine compliment. I'm not sophisticated enough to realize you're being sarcastic. At least you're getting some comments, kinda arid around your blog, brrr.
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